Better Meetings Through Technology: Will AI deliver us magical meetings?

2 weeks ago

By Elise Keith

“My goal is to make
sure no one ever has to write meeting notes again.” I’m talking with a product
manager working to perfect automated call transcription. If find idea both
exciting and problematic.

The
Dream

Fully automated transcription is just the first
step towards a grander vision.

As an AI enthusiast told me, “Notes are just the
start. Consider – what if AI could make sure the meeting goes well in the first
place? What if an AI agent kept the discussion on track? What if it knew how to
help a group resolve a conflict? That day may not be too far off.”

Automated
Transcription and Conversational Intelligence

Machine transcription isn’t perfect, but it
gets enough right to catch the main ideas. Then you can analyze the records.

What topics come up? How’s the engagement? What
do successful people do in their meetings to get results?

This last question drives much of the current
development. Many AI products target sales and support meetings.

Why? First, managers can easily distinguish a
successful result from a fail here
giving customers a reason to buy AI technologies despite their
imperfections.

Gong.io, for example, doesn’t market meeting
notes. They market their ability to win more sales.

Sales and support meetings are also short and
often involve just two people. If you’ve ever dictated audio to your phone, you
know that while the technology is getting better, short and simple work best.

Predictive
Analytics

AI technologies can provide important clues
about how the meeting went. You can’t count on AI to provide all the answers,
though, so MeetingQuality combines AI
insights with human reviews to predict sales and project success.

” We compare the tone detected by AI from the
salesperson (mostly joy) to that of the customer (mostly sadness),” shared
Kelvin McGrath, MeetingQuality’s CEO. “Comparing emotions from the rep and the
customer, to the next steps, and the customer’s rating of the meeting, provides
serious predictive capability on the likelihood of success.

One surprising finding from project meetings: whenever
stakeholders exhibit disgust, the project is almost irretrievably lost no
matter what other project indicators report.”

Yikes! How can AI prevent this kind of failure?

Conversational
Coaching

AI technologies are pretty good at detecting
interaction patterns (pauses, trigger words, etc.) and making a real-time assessment
of the meeting’s emotional tone.

Cogito uses this to deliver conversational
coaching tips to support agents.

Because it’s AI and not human, agents get
“conversational collision detection” cues on every call. That’s the promise of
AI – it never gets bored or tired. The cues are simple, but what they lack in
sophistication they make up for in scale.

AI can handle an
increasing number of simple tasks, because it’s always learning. This learning
requires lots of data and expensive training to recognize each customer’s specialized
vocabulary – like industry lingo and product names.

This means the benefits of today’s AI meeting
assistants can best be realized in high-volume sales and service organizations.

That just leaves the other 90%+ of meetings!

Augmenting
Technology for More Complex Business Meetings

Most meetings involve more than two people in a variety of
complex situations. It’s far from clear when or even if there will ever be a
robot facilitator sophisticated enough to help these meetings succeed.

A quick search for software designed to support
the specific kind of meeting you’re running will reveal many more examples.

Augmented
Intelligence Means We’re Still Responsible for Results

So why do I find the prospect of automated
notes problematic?

Meetings are by definition a gathering of
people seeking a mutual understanding of their common future.

What matters is the understanding created in the minds of the people, not the mind
of the machine. How do the people feel afterwards? More importantly, what are
the people going to do next?

Often this value crystallizes only when people
take the time to discuss and write it down.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the robot
observes. It’s what people take away that gives a meeting impact.

Will
AI technology deliver us magical meetings?

No. Meeting success depends on human
interaction and interpretation – technology can’t “deliver” that in the same
way you deliver a pizza.

I believe, however, that when used to reveal
ways we humans can improve, technology will dramatically augment our ability to make meeting magic.

The good news: once you get specific about the
kind of meeting, today’s technology can put that magic within reach.

J. Elise
Keith is the co-founder of Lucid Meetings and the author of Where the Action
Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization. For more information,
please visit, www.lucidmeetings.com
and connect with her on Twitter, @EliseID8.